Long Island Bios

Here I am then, after months of thinking about it, weeks of worrying about it and, a few days of getting stressed about it and 20 straight hours actually doing it I arrived in Cold Spring harbor Long Island, NY, US of A!

The truth is that you don't need that much of fuss even if a business trip is to last the month and a half mine is going to but my usual anxiety, combined with a working load and a growing nostalgia which has become dual, making me miss Greece and Barcelona at the same time, all reached a combined peak two days before I rode the plane and it all became a bit depressing.

Luckily, this soon turned into yet another demonstration that home is where your hat is...or to put it less prosaically wherever you lay down to sleep. Especially if you are a Greek bearing something from Ulysses' genes. You just pack clothes, books and music, your best memories from the place you are leaving, your greatest expectations for the place you are going, then invite your friends for a nice dinner and some wine and the next morning you take off.

Cold Spring Harbor Bios is better than I expected, long walks by the sea under the thin shadow of the oaks and the slightly thicker one giants of science, who overlook you from their portraits in the auditorium, dining rooms and meeting halls. I have to admit that I am enjoying meeting people that are supposed to be great scientists of today, but my well-established tendency to like everything classic and taciturn against anything new make me doubt a lot about where science is going today, few new ideas with a lot of technology, too much searching for stuff, without much imagination about what to look for...

But maybe it's just me, in fact who am I to judge these people. In fact they are the ones entitled to talk about work. All I really want to do here in the US, is reading Faulkner's "As I lay dying", which I find much more exciting than nucleosomes, listen to jazz that sounds much more appealing than talks about SNPs (narcoleptic crisis ahead) and hang around with friends I have not seen for a while, while having drinks on the lawn...

Maybe it's just me, but Cold Spring Harbor Bios is much more fun the way it is not supposed to be.